Between Two Fires

by Christopher Buehlman

“You’re really going to the river, then?” “I said I would.” “What we say and what we do are . . .” “Well, I do what I say. Which is why I don’t say much.”

She was still disturbed by the sight of the dead young nuns near the hospital and she wanted a woman to hold her and tell her that the whole world didn’t yet belong to Death, masculine Death with his hourglass and his holes for eyes. Death with his bony arms that only embraced to take you away, like a lamb from market.

How was she to believe man was anything special when he looked so much like any other animal in death?

“She was tempted by something stronger than her. Adam was tempted by a weaker creature. Or so we are told. If Eve was his inferior, his sin was greater. You can’t have it both ways.”

The knight would never forget the image of the faltering priest holding the girl up; how like the raising of the Eucharist it looked.

“Our ship sank in the river. My daughter will die without warmth.”

From that day forward, three taps of her ring on anything meant, Do you remember our wedding day? and three taps on his part meant, God, yes.

He hoped there was wine in his Heaven.

It was easier to believe in witches, after all. Their motives were of this world. Revenge, power, pleasure. Who has not wanted one or all of these?

“Tell me she’s dead. Tell me the plague took her and she died in a fever saying she was sorry. Maybe then.” “It doesn’t work that way. That’s not forgiveness, it’s justice. And wretched justice at that.”

So much of life demanded a kind of truce with perceived facts—one could not allow the suffering of the kitchen women, for example, to spoil the taste of capon. Neither would those women trouble themselves about the gnawings of a rat at the summer sausage; just cut that end off and serve the rest.

Love is always harder. Love means weathering blows for another’s sake and not counting them. Love is loss of self, loss of other, and faith in the death of loss.